Democracy’s Prospects: Looking Backward

In the past, political transparency toward the people was antithetical to the government by an aristocratic elite. But has the US ever been a a government of, by, and for the people and how could it genuinely become one?

Democracy, says the author, “is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs . . . its first requirement is a supportive culture, a complex of beliefs, values, and practices that nurture equality, cooperation, and freedom.” In this regard, “A rarely discussed but crucial need of a self-governing society is that the members and those they elect to office tell the truth.” This need is what the final chapter of Democracy Incorporated is about.

Self-government—a government of, by, and for the people—is not possible if those in office assume that, when necessary, the citizenry can be lied to. Yet, in the age of spin doctors, public relations experts, and pollsters, Beltway politics in the United States is more about politics re-presented to citizens than politics representing them. According to Sheldon Wolin, a century of advertising in the U.S. has accustomed the public to exaggerations, false claims, and fantasies. Political consultants and media experts largely use proven selling techniques to frame the narrative most convenient to financial and political powers over citizens’ heads. Wars, for instance, are the objects of professional marketing campaigns, turning truth into a cheap commodity for the military-industrial complex.¹

Republican lawmakers, in particular, see no limits to the game, serenely considering the crafting of alternate facts as the hallmark of sound governance. The existence of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, the absence of global warming, or, more recently, the 2020 “stolen” elections will remain in history as telling examples of their wild conception of moral and intellectual honesty. The fact is that they do not care. When your sole motivation is power, you are not accountable to anyone about anything regarding the truth, least of all your own conscience. “At bottom, says Sheldon Wolin, lying is the expression of a will to power. My power is increased if you accept a picture of the world which is the product of my will.”²

On the other hand, it is almost a cliché that leaders will have to lie, mislead, or conceal facts from the public for the greatest interest of the nation. Lying is presumed to be “a dispensation allowed only to elites who, theoretically, are more politically knowledgeable and experienced than ordinary citizens.” This conception of power is reminiscent of Plato’s theory of government. To him, it was necessary that a specially educated class of philosophers would monopolize political decision-making. Immune to the illusions by which most men live, they would filter their reasons by telling myths good enough for the population’s limited capacities.³

However, as Sheldon Wolin reminds us, “Plato portrays his rulers as begrudging the time spent on politics and as looking forward to the day when they can retire and pursue philosophy. They are strictly limited in the years spent in office. A crucial difference between Plato and the neocons is that his polity is forbidden to expand or embark on foreign conquests. Further, in Plato’s antidemocracy there is no provision for interaction between the elite and the populace; hence while there is no provision for holding rulers accountable to the ruled, by the same token there is no likelihood of the Alcibiades dynamic of a demagogic elite exploiting mass emotion or of a mass inciting leaders to foreign adventures.”

Yet, Plato stated that philosophers, guardians, and workers formed the three main categories of people in the city and that it was virtually impossible for anyone to evolve from one category to the other. People belonged to a category by their very soul, the same way that gold, silver, or copper are three different types of metal. Conservatives of all stripes have always adhered to this type of thinking. They assume in good faith that, as long as it is geared toward the good of all, the principle of government can and should be based on some intrinsic discrimination between those who can govern and those who cannot.

Though one step above Trump’s vulgarity and incompetence, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin exemplify such intellectual shortsightedness today. They simply won’t admit that if people can educate themselves, they also deserve transparency and full accountability in how their elected officials govern the country. By contrast, Plato had at least the merit of coherence. Those he categorized as philosophers were supposed to seek a superior form of knowledge whose object, by definition, was beyond the conditioned reality of this world.

1. See Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (New York: Penguin, 2006).
2. Bernard Williams, Truth and truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 118. “This book is the best available discussion of the subject,” according to Sheldon Wolin.
3. The same idea was developed by political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973). See Intellectual Elites against Democracy on this website.